The movie The Miracle Club lets its audience decide whether a pilgrimage to Lourdes was miraculous or not.
The movie The Miracle Club lets its audience decide whether a pilgrimage to Lourdes was miraculous or not.
M arie-Bernarde Soubirous, later known as Saint Bernadette, was the eldest daughter of a French miller, living in the small town of Lourdes at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains in the mid 1800s. At 14 years old, Marie reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary in the nearby Massabielle grotto, and said she instructed her to drink from a spring there.
Initially, few believed Marie, including her own family and the local clergy. Nevertheless, after a canonical investigation, the visions were deemed “worthy of belief” by Pope Pius IX in 1862. Over the past 160 years, 70 of the 7,000 claims of miraculous cures have been authenticated by the Catholic Church.
Every year, around 6 million pilgrims visit the shrine, many of them suffering and in search of renewed hope. This is the backdrop to The Miracle Club, a new movie by Sony Pictures Classics.
Set in 1967 in Dublin, Ireland, the film tells the story of three friends spanning three generations who are overjoyed to win spots on a parish pilgrimage to Lourdes. They are Lily (Maggie Smith), Eileen Dunne (Kathy Bates), and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey). But they are joined by an outsider, Chrissie (Laura Linney), who has returned to Dublin for her mother’s funeral after 40 years in America. Chrissie quickly warms to Dolly but is mysteriously estranged from the other two.
It’s not clear that any of them has a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary, let alone to Saint Bernadette. Nevertheless, each woman is in search of a miracle. Lily’s son was drowned at sea as a young man and, ever since, she has been carrying guilt for what happened. Eileen has a lump in her breast that she’s terrified is cancerous. Dolly’s son, Daniel, is mute despite being an ostensibly normal seven-year-old. And then there’s Chrissie, taking her late mother’s ticket, a skeptic along for the ride.
Soon enough, the backstory accounting for the tension between Chrissie and Lily and Eileen emerges. When they were both teenagers, Chrissie fell in love with Lily’s son, Declan, and the two conceived a child. However, Lily, with help from Eileen and Chrissie’s mother, worked to break them up, sending Chrissie to America and telling Declan that she’d left him out of choice. Declan, despairing, drowned himself. Chrissie, upon arrival in America, was pressured by her landlady into getting an abortion, which she did.
The abortion story comes out while the women attempt to console Dolly. Dolly feels guilty that Daniel’s inability to speak may be because she tried to kill him in utero. But the others reassure her that having a bath of cold water and whiskey won’t end a pregnancy. “The water has to be hot,” Chrissie explains. Eileen admits to having thrown herself down the stairs to end pregnancies, multiple times, though to no avail.
Ireland only recently legalized abortion. And the scene is a reference to this supposedly pre-enlightened past. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the movie’s most anachronistic moment. Sure, some Irish women sought and even had abortions back then. But it was hardly a relatable experience, especially among those religiously motivated enough to go on a pilgrimage. Raising a large family in a working-class environment had its difficulties. Still, most families welcomed children as blessings.
The portrayal of Eileen and Lily as hypocritical is contrasted against Chrissie, who, as the group’s skeptic, emerges as its most virtuous character. In one scene she asks Father Dermot Byrne (Mark O’Halloran) whether he really believes that the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette. Father Byrne replies that “it doesn’t matter whether she did or not.” Father Byrne later delivers the movie’s message: “You don’t come to Lourdes looking for a miracle. You come looking for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.”
It’s a fine sentiment, broad enough to be open to both a religious and a nonreligious interpretation. That, at the end of the movie, the women are reconciled, that Chrissie forgives those who harmed her, that all three of them leave feeling inspired, that their respective husbands have grown more grateful in their absence for all they do, that little Daniel utters a single word, “home” (albeit audible only to the audience), proves the pilgrimage’s benefit.
Whether this transformation is best explained by their own efforts or by the subtle workings of grace is up to the audience to decide.
